The Dragon's Path

disturbed into waking. But it was only the voice of the fire.
    The gates shuddered, warping from the heat. A group of figures appeared on the wall, men and women trying to flee. In a moment as clear and sudden as a lightning strike, one in particular was silhouetted by the flames. Geder could tell that she was a woman, but not what race she was. She waved her arms, trying to communicate something. He had the sudden, powerful urge to send someone to her, to save her, but already she was gone. Some tendril of flame reached the near-empty granaries, and the stirred grain dust detonated like a thunderclap. Smoke rose whirling, a vortex of darkness that dwarfed the city. The wind that pushed past him was the draw of the flames. The roar was too loud to speak over.
    Geder sat, eyes wide, as bits of ash rained down around him. The heat of the dying city pressed against his face like the desert sun. He’d imagined himself sitting there, watching until it was done. He hadn’t understood that Vanai would burn for days.
    He hadn’t understood
anything.
    “Let’s go,” he said. No one heard him. “It’s enough! Let’s go!”
    The order went out, and the army of Antea pulled back from the furnace. Geder abandoned the thought of his grand rhetorical gesture. Nothing he could say would measure up to the conflagration. He went back to his tent, wondering if they were camped too close. What if the fire broke through the walls? What if it came for him?
    He waved his squire away and curled up on the cot. He was too tired to move, and the nightmare howl of the flameswouldn’t stop. He stared at the top of his tent, seeing the small figure waving her arms and dying. Geder pressed his hand to his mouth, biting at the skin until it bled, trying to make the noise go away.
    The smoke of ten thousand people rose into the sky.

CITHRIN
     
    W ord of the destruction of Vanai washed over Porte Oliva. In the Grand Market and at the port, in the taprooms and the wayhouses and the steps that led to the brick-and-glass labyrinth that was the governor’s palace, detail piled upon detail as reports came in by ship and horse and raw speculation. The city had burned for three days. The Antean forces had barred the gate and slaughtered anyone who tried to escape. The canals had been drained so that there would be no water to slow the fire. The Anteans had poured barrels of lamp oil in the streets before they left. The heat had shattered stones. The smoke had carried the smell of burning as far as Maccia and turned the sunsets red. Charred bodies were still clogging the weirs at Newport.
    Cithrin grabbed at each rumor like one of the ever-present beggars watching for dropped coins. At first, she hadn’t believed it. Cities didn’t die overnight. The streets and canals she’d known all her life couldn’t become ruins just because someone said it, even if the man speaking was an Antean general. It was ridiculous. But with every retelling, every new voice that said the same things, her incredulity faded. Even if they were all only echoing one another, the weight of their combined belief pulled her along.
    Vanai was dead.
    “Are you all right?” Sandr asked.
    Cithrin leaned forward, her legs swinging from the side of the actors’ cart like a child sitting on too high a stool. Around them, the midday crowd shuffled. She watched a reed-thin Cinnae boy thread himself through the press of bodies, following the colorless thatch of his hair. The smell of the sea brine made the air feel cooler than it was. She didn’t know how to answer, but she tried.
    “I don’t know. I think so. It’s hard to live in the middle of all this,” she said, nodding at the press of humanity around them, “and really feel the deaths. I mean, I know that Magister Imaniel is gone. And Cam must be too. All the boys who played in the streets are dead, and that makes me sad sometimes. But when I start thinking that it’s
all
gone—the fresh market and the palaces and the flat barges and all of it—it gets… I don’t know. Abstract?”
    “That’s a good word for it,” Sandr said, nodding as if he knew what she meant.
    “Nobody knows me now. I’ve lived my whole life in Vanai. It felt like everyone knew who I was.
What
I was. And now that they’re all gone, there’s nothing holding me to that anymore. Captain Wester, Yardem Hane, you, and Master Kit’s company. You are the people in the world who know me best.”
    “It’s hard,” Sandr said, taking her